Intense craving for particular food / SAT 8-24-19 / Rhyming toy / Spot to buy tix in NYC / Royal Navy stronghold during WW II / 2001 best seller with tiger on its cover / Symbols seen in comic strip cursing / Crossbow-wielding creature of sci-fi

Constructor: Sam Ezersky

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (8:48)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: OPSOMANIA (46A: Intense craving for a particular food) —

[it's not in Webster's 3rd Intl, so here is a wikipedia entry on opson (Gr.)]: Opson (Greek: ὄψον) is an important category in Ancient Greek foodways. First and foremost opson refers to a major division of ancient Greek food: the 'relish' that complements the sitos (σίτος) the staple part of the meal, i.e. wheat or barley.

Opson is therefore equivalent to  Banchan in Korean cuisine and Okazu in Japanese cuisine. Because it was considered the more pleasurable part of any meal, opson was the subject of some anxiety among ancient Greek moralists, who coined the term opsophagia to describe the vice of those who took too much opson with their sitos.

Although any kind of complement to the staple, even salt, could be categorized as opson, the term was also commonly used to refer to the most esteemed kind of relish: fish. Hence a diminutive of opson, opsarion (ὀψάριον), provides the modern Greek word for fish:  psari (ψάρι), and the term opsophagos, literally 'opson-eater', is almost always used by classical authors to refer to men who are fanatical about seafood, e.g. Philoxenus of Leucas.

Finally, opson can be used to mean a 'prepared dish' (plural opsa). Plato, probably mistakenly, derived the word from the verb ἕψω - 'to boil'.

The central focus of Greek personal morality on self-control made opsophagia a matter of concern for moralists and satirists in the classical period. The complicated semantics of the word opson and its derivatives made the word a matter of concern for Atticists during the Second Sophistic. (wikipedia)

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There were some definite highlights here, most notably the clue on TECH SAVVY (65A: E-sharp?), which, as my friend Rebecca Falcon said to me just now, beats every damn e-joke in the e-puzzle this past Wednesday. And it's oddly impressive to get two longish V-ending entries (!!!) to stand side-by-side like that at the bottom of the grid. Clue on CROP CIRCLE, also solid in its misdirectionality (35A: Unbelievable discovery in one's field). Much of this, though, felt weird, off, or hard for bad/dumb reasons. Weird: well, that's a polite word for the ridiculous inclusion of NRA in yet another puzzle (42A: Org. with magazines on magazines). Hahaha what cute wordplay I almost forgot all the mass shootings by white supremacist terrorist who easily got their hands on weapons of war because of the NRA. Tee hee. It's fun! Change C'MON to CLOT, and we're done. Nobody's gonna like TRA, but nobody's gonna like ATS or OID, and they're in here, so ... I guess I should be happy that they managed to lay off the right-wing cluing at 12D: Take precedence over (TRUMP). Tone deaf and amoral is the kind of cluing I've come to expect from the current regime. So that sucked.


Also sucking: HALFA (!?!?!) [space] LOAF (52D: With 38-Down, amount to make do with). First of all, what? Second of all, ugh, bad enough to split a phrase, but to have to resort to cross-reference for a phrase this weak and lumpy?! Terrible. The TO in ACTODC is making my eye twitch. WET NOODLE is not a thing people say, and certainly not a thing people say to describe a [Wimp]. It's too close to WET BLANKET. I think I know the phrase only from an idiom ... something's being "better than 50 lashes with a WET NOODLE"—did I make that up? Dream it? Hang on ... HA, no, I'm *right*—though the number of lashes seems to vary widely. Here's a NYT headline that uses 50, so I feel vindicated. But [Wimp]? That ain't it. (side note: don't ask urban dictionary what WET NOODLE means ... just don't).


Then there's OPSOMANIA, which, oof. Yes, I do love to learn new words, blah blah blah, but this is someone's wordlist run amok. It's difficulty for difficulty's sake. Nothing very edifying about it. Also, the "W" in SLOW-MO???? (7D: Highlight reel effect). That was jarring to me. I've only ever seen SLO-MO. The "MO" is already abbreviated, and surely that's the harder part to figure out. You gotta go SLO. That "W" feels entirely unnecessary. Looking around the internet, I see that some folks are using the "W" version, so maybe it's more common than I imagined, but yuck and no. The NYTXW itself says: SLOMO 39, SLOWMO ... 1. Just one. Today's entry. Yes, six-letter entries are as a rule going to be much less prevalent than five-letter entries, but still, 39-0 before today ... should tell you something. Good night.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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